


"For Your Sake I Have Braved the Glen and Had to Do with Goblin Merchant Men"

by thegirlwiththemouseyhair



Category: Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Supernatural Elements, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 22:42:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2790380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirlwiththemouseyhair/pseuds/thegirlwiththemouseyhair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A very small snippet here as I'm afraid that's all I've had time for - but thanks for requesting this, recip; I went on a little "kick" with this poem, reread it something like four times in a week and a half, and was absolutely chuffed to see prompts for it. It could be adapted into a great modern urban fantasy piece which I may indeed revisit - but for now I hope you enjoy this little treat.</p>
    </blockquote>





	"For Your Sake I Have Braved the Glen and Had to Do with Goblin Merchant Men"

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ijemanja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ijemanja/gifts).



> A very small snippet here as I'm afraid that's all I've had time for - but thanks for requesting this, recip; I went on a little "kick" with this poem, reread it something like four times in a week and a half, and was absolutely chuffed to see prompts for it. It could be adapted into a great modern urban fantasy piece which I may indeed revisit - but for now I hope you enjoy this little treat.

Mum and Dad tried everything – the school counsellor, of course, and old Doctor Morris, who’d looked after Liz and Lauren since they were babies, the NHS psychologist Morris suggested, and a dozen other experts, but Liz knew they wouldn’t help. She knew Mum and Dad couldn’t even believe what was wrong, any more than Jenny’s friends and parents had acknowledged _how_ Jenny had been led to drown in that brook. But Liz knew the story. She’d seen most of it happen to Lauren, and she’d believed Jenny’s sobbing accounts of the apparitions in the rushes by the brook, before that last time she went down there.

Liz was as scared as any of the girls of the apparitions or fairies or goblins (because _fairies_ sounded too graceful and too kind for those animal-like things hawking their fruits and wrapping their damp furred hands around girls’ wrists or legs, and leaving no reflection in compact mirrors or pictures on mobile phones). But to see Lauren sitting silent by the window, too sick to go to school but with nothing physically wrong so they’d keep her in hospital – Lauren stammering when she tried to speak and running to the toilet to retch when Mum tried to get her to eat – was more than Liz could bear.

“I’m going to get help,” Liz said one evening after school when Lauren was sitting by the window in her room, looking particularly bad. She didn’t even understand. At least, she gave no sign that she understood, just stared at the floor, wheezing. Liz’s chest constricted.

“I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

She stopped briefly in her own room across from Lauren’s. Liz glanced in the mirror. She put her hair up in a tight bun, so it would be harder for wet, inhuman hands to grab at, and put on a long trench coat over her rather short school skirt before double checking the charge on her mobile. When she knew the battery wouldn’t die on her, she put the phone and her wallet in her pocket and left her bedroom, turning off the light behind her.

Liz crept downstairs again, called to Mum (who was on the phone with yet another doctor) that she was going for a walk, and crossed the dark garden path down to the glen and the brook.

As soon as she was out of the gate she pulled her mobile out of her coat pocket and fumbled with it. It lagged for a bit when she pressed the icon for the flashlight app. Then light flooded from the solid, reassuring weight in her hand at last; it made its clicking sound ( _wouldn’t that make more sense for the camera app?_ she and Lauren had joked when Mum and Dad presented them with twin mobile phones last Christmas). The noise was music to her ears. Her shoes squelched in the damp earth and sodden leaves beneath her feet, but Liz walked steadily on, downward, until she spied the hunched backs of those creatures only young girls could see and, for the first time in her life, drew in a deep breath to speak to them.


End file.
